<nettime> articles on Ingmar Bergman

[Karl-Erik Tallmo <ketallmo@nisus.se>]

Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter had a special today about Ingmar 
Bergman, with two of the articles translated into English. One is 
written by one of Sweden's more prominent theater critics, Leif Zern:

Love and Daemons
See http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=2712&a=675578

Then there is an article by the Bergman biographer Maaret Koskinen:

Death has wrapped its large mantle around Bergman
See http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=2712&a=675560

Many have emphasized Bergman's visual genius (achieved in 
co-operation with Sven Nykvist) and his great interest in music, and 
that his greatest love actually was the theater, not film - but I 
think one aspect that is seldom mentioned is the special rhetoric, 
the very special verbal flow articulated through his actors, e.g. 
Erland Josephson and Gunnar Bjornstrand, and of course Max von Sydow. 
But also the famous "Bergman women" sometimes excel in these almost 
breathless verbal outbursts.

There is a similarity here with another Swedish director, Hasse 
Ekman, who also had a very special talent for a sort of smooth 
eloquence, but Bergman's characters (think  Erland Josephson in 
"Scenes From a Marriage") are mostly ironic, sarcastic, bitter or 
just lost in this world, while Ekman was always elegant and made even 
misery seem somehow endurable through his mere voice and timbre.

I think this use of voices and voice quality together with often very 
non-oral literary utterances have not attracted as much attention as 
I think they should. Bergman used his actors as a composer chooses 
instruments for a piece of music. Somebody wrote the other day that 
Bergman managed to deal with all these existential topics without 
being pretentious. I think he was very pretentious - but he got away 
with it beautifully, partly I believe through this very special use 
of certain actors and their marvellous, not to say idiosyncratic, 
diction.

See also http://www.ingmarbergman.se/

/Karl-Erik Tallmo


-- 

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